Your mindset in approaching any goal-oriented situation can absolutely make or break you.
Through our work with professional athletes and special operations personnel in the military and law enforcement communities, we've learned just how essential it is to take control of your mindset before engaging in any critical activity.
If it's critical, you don't want to leave any meaningful factor up to chance. And your mindset is one of the most important factors of all -- one that you've got to prepare with the same focus than you'd use to prep your equipment, create and review your "plan of attack", practice your techniques, and so on.
This is why those leaders and warriors and athletes who compete at the extremes are "mindset maniacs" -- they know and live this truth every day.
Fearless leaders consistently and intentionally create an optimal state of mind before they even begin to engage in a challenging or important life situation, whether it's personal or professional.
Public speaking, receiving a performance review, or even just arriving home after a hard day's work are all times when our stress can be alleviated by simply learning to temper our self-defeatism.
Before they enter into any new setting, Mindset Maniacs know that the two most important facets to performing at their best include:
Focusing on their mindset allows them to both ensure they have an aligned mind and that they are fully prepared temperamentally.
But the path to getting there is spiral in it's development. Each fearless leader trait fosters the others.
Having the courage to fail makes it easier to stay in the moment. Being mindful helps you to know when your emotions and mindset slip. Checking in with yourself and focusing on your mindset before critical events helps to make your more mindful. And emotional and social intelligence provide the self regulation to help you deal with the stress and stay motivated, which makes it easier to exercise courage.
We define aligned minds as creating a kind of symmetry between mental and emotional energy. Alignment eliminates distractions. Mental chaos or interference is a huge obstacle to your ability to focus and be totally present in pivotal life events.
Your subconscious mind has extraordinary power. Focusing on your mindset helps to harness this power by increasing the degree to which your unconscious mind is aligned with your conscious mind.
Focusing on your mindset can also strengthen your conscious mind by exercising greater control of your conscious thoughts feelings and associations before entering into a stressful situation. You are mentally priming yourself for top performance.
Here are the four brief steps to replace destructive thoughts with constructive ones in order to control your mind:
Fearless leaders are mindset maniacs for a reason: top performance in stressful situations is impossible without consciously taking control of your mindset and creating an aligned mind.
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Fearless Leaders grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. It’s the most practical book I’ve read on how to heighten mindfulness and ignite personal courage. It’s a powerful book, tough at times, tender at others. From her own fearless experiences, and those of leaders she’s studied, Dr. Cathy Greenberg offers revealing self-assessments, intimate first-person examples, and engaging applied exercises. Follow the steps she outlines and they will enable you to achieve higher levels of performance and greater awareness of yourself and your environment. With Fearless Leaders as your guide you’ll make better decisions and lead a more passionate life. You can’t ask for more than that from any book!
—Jim Kouzes
Fearless Leaders tackles (and teaches) one of the most complex attributes of outstanding leaders throughout history, moral courage.
—Amy Edmondson
That's a tough one, moral courage is hard to teach and it's such an important quality for leaders. If we could get more people to step up to use moral courage more often - we would see better results.
—Jerry Boykin
After having the pleasure of recording an On Demand Seminar with Dr. Cathy Greenberg, I was astonished by her ground-breaking perspective on leadership, and the role she takes herself as an inspirational leader. Not only did I learn to sharpen my focus, she also showed me how to achieve greater confidence and courage to become an inspirational leader myself. She was truly a pleasure to work with, and I am thrilled that she accepted to be a faculty at the Gazelles Growth Institute.
—Daniel Marcos
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